#i suspected something had happened bts because he never seemed into the major label stuff

[dearly]

Flamboyant.” “Ridiculous.” “Over the top.” When UK musician Patrick Wolf arrived on the scene in the mid-2000s, these were the words that greeted him. The classically trained wunderkind had joined Leigh Bowery’s art collective Minty when he was just 13; he released his first album in 2003 at age 19 – but it featured work he had been recording since he was 11.

His five subsequent albums pushed and melded genres, intertwining baroque pop with folk, disco synths with spoken word by Tilda Swinton. His wardrobe was just as unpredictable, from button-ups to leather harnesses to winter coats which, when shed, would reveal glittery wings.

Over the top? Maybe to people back then. But maybe not any more.

In 2012, after releasing Sundark & Riverlight, it seemed the curtains were closing on Wolf: what started as a sabbatical became a hiatus that showed few signs of ending.

“I didn’t know whether [that album] was the final chapter, really,” he says.

It started with a general burn-out, ill-timed to coincide with a “cluster-fuck of financial and legal problems regarding management”. Wolf recuperated largely by writing alone in a makeshift studio, in a South London stable block. Then in August 2015 – the same day Wolf tested the waters of a return, announcing pre-orders for his first poetry collection – he was hit by a car while on holiday in Venice. Shortly after that, his mother fell ill.

“It completely whacked me out for six,” says Wolf. “Everything seemed to be saying, ‘Darkness is at your doorstep. You’ve got to change your life or you’re not going to be around for much longer’. That was the message. I took it very much on board.

“I’ll get into the specifics one day, but I’m very happy to be here right now. I’ll leave it at that.���

Now recovered and self-managed, Wolf is eager for a comeback. When we speak over the phone, he’s on a mini-tour of Australia, and hopes to mix an album afterwards in the New South Wales pristine Blue Mountains. He’s also written the book that feverish fans put a down-payment on three years ago – “only a few” have asked for refunds, he says – and he hopes both projects will be released together. “They’re [based around] very similar ideas of recovery and a period of darkness. So they’re kind of twinning at the moment.”

Wolf is reluctant to divulge details of that dark period, but not because he wants to keep it private. “I’ve made an album about that period and I’m finishing it off,” he says, pausing. “Once that statement’s out there fully, I’ll be able to discuss it further. There’s no point going through all that strife, that pain, without having something positive and beautiful in a work of art to give to the world.”

Wolf’s wariness is evident in each word, which carries the weight of its consideration. It’s understandable given both his past few years, and his irksome history with the press – in particular the way his clippings framed and centred his sexuality.

Perhaps most frustrating were those adjectives that couched Wolf’s perceived effeminacy – his “flamboyance” – as a marketable quirk. In a recent interview with the Courier Mail, Wolf revealed that there were times when his record label had asked him to be “more gay”, a non-threatening type which could be both promoted and/or derided as frivolous and campy.

“I guess it meant, ‘Be more asexual’,” he said. “Be more Elton John; be more a gay that we can understand as a product, not something that is unquantifiable and would quite terrify the public. Be less queer, be more gay, if that makes sense.

“When the third album came along, this one journalist asked me about my sexuality,” Wolf says. “I was never in the closet, but when the word ‘bisexual’ or ‘gay’ came into the mix, they became a prefix. So I stopped being a musician – I became a ‘gay artist’. For 10 years, that’s what stuck.”

Wolf found the focus on his sexuality was a “double-edged sword” in the mid-2000s. “What one person finds liberating by reading that word [in an article], another finds a deterrent. As an artist, you feel like you’re not given an equal platform.”

But things have changed. Artists like Frank Ocean, Troye Sivan, Janelle Monae and Perfume Genius may still be framed by their queerness, but they are arguably less defined by it, and are able to set their own terms about their narrative and identity.

In a way, Wolf considers himself a sacrifice, along with his queer contemporaries such as Tegan & Sara, Darren Hayes and Jake Shears.

“I took the bullet! I took the bullet so other people didn’t have to, for like 10 years,” he says. “If I had to do that, I had to do that. You know, I want to be doing this for another 50 years. I hope I see a lot of revisions of culture.”